The one lesson I’ve learned from life
Amanda Redman
ACTRESS Amanda Redman, 60, has starred in TV series At Home With The Braithwaites and new Tricks, and in films including Sexy Beast. She has a daughter, emily, 30, from her first marriage to actor Robert Glenister and is now married to designer damian Schnabel.
ACCEPTANCE IS KEY TO SURVIVING GRIEF
ONE day during my 20s, I was moaning to my mum, Joan, about how depressed I was about being so old. Ridiculous, I know. And that was her reaction, too.
‘Yes, you’re getting older,’ she said, ‘and that’s going to keep on happening. So just accept it and learn to enjoy every minute.’ It must have struck a chord because even though I like a good moan, she imbued in me a real zest for life.
I try, wherever humanly possible, to live in the moment and have the confidence to speak my mind. It didn’t happen immediately, but by the time I got to my 40s I’d acquired the courage to stand up for myself if, professionally speaking, I thought something was wrong.
I remember working on one TV project and telling the director the way in which I thought he was getting something wrong. And he listened, changed it and made it better.
Mind you, there have times when I’ve been sorely tested, as I was in 2014, the worst year of my life. My dear friend, the actress Lynda Bellingham, whom I met while filming At Home With The Braithwaites, succumbed to cancer aged 66 and the next day I lost my mother. A family friend also died that year.
I was a mess. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that life seemed pointless if good people were going to be taken too young. It wasn’t until I went to Sri Lanka in 2016 to shoot medical drama The Good Karma Hospital that I turned a corner.
I was sitting on the balcony of my hotel, talking out loud to both Lynda and my mother — it was the anniversaries of their deaths — when an incredible sense of calm descended on me.
From that day, a feeling of acceptance grew. Now, I think of them with a sadness that won’t go away, but that’s tempered with a kind of happiness, as I remember the good times we shared.
AMANDA REDMAN stars in ITV’s The Good Karma Hospital on Sunday at 9pm.